As in any maturing market, there is an ongoing tension between the heavy weight of the vertically integrated systems that kick-started this assurance infrastructure, and the paper-thin, but tightly laminated layers of process that now support it.

The many-celled structure that we have now is undoubtedly costly and cumbersome and may still not be delivering the assurance that’s required.

The Sustainability team does a good job of starting to unbundle both the functions and outcomes of assurance systems and so begins to reveal some of the inefficiencies, opacities and redundancies of so many overlapping schemes.

They don’t suggest that labels and certifications are to be made redundant, but they do imply that the provision of Credibility is an exercise in the gathering, auditing, assuring and communication of non-financial impact; and that each of these is a specialist task, susceptible to optimisation; and that all might be rebundled in new and more resilient ways.

We live in a fast-maturing market for Credibility, when values-based claims are increasingly susceptible to investigation.  Any entity, or set of entities seeking to make judgemental claims of a product must assess its risk from two standpoints.

Firstly, what is the assurance-value inherent in that claim, compared to others’ claims? i.e. How much value are consumers investing in the claims being made?

Secondly, what is the scepticism-risk inherent within the trust network of that claim? i.e. How likely is it that a sceptical observer would find a claim dishonest, or disingenuous.

Where risk and value intersect, rational judgements can be made about the breadth and depth of the reassurance to be provided.

There is a third issue though, and one which goes to the heart of this dilemma. What is the social coherence of the claim? i.e. How resilient are the value-exchanges that support it? How incentivised are stakeholders to supply legal, decent, honest and truthful information?  If power is distributed too much to the top or the bottom of the assurance system, or even captured by the middle, credibility will be imperilled.

There are major clues in this report that the way to unglue this matrix lies in interoperable assurance networks, which can overlay individual supply-chains, and that the credibility platform, and the reassurance processes that sit on that platform will need to become increasingly separate, and increasingly specialised, over time.

Brands are fighting hard for their Credibility. Certification systems will need to offer them ever stronger Reassurance.

In addition to Patagonia’s 4Rs – Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, I think its about time we introduced a new first R – Refuse.

We all have the will, but possibly not always the willpower, to refuse the efforts of marketers – including the iconic Patagonia – to persuade us to buy more stuff.

Just because an economy needs growth, does not mean that that growth must come at the expense of the earth.

If we are to be persuaded to pay good money for intangible benefits, then the less tangible, the less resource intensive and the less energy intensive these are, the better.  Recycling is a safety net, Reuse is vital, Repair is good, Reduction is great; but Refusal is better.  Reduction slows the cogs, but selective Refusal, is in the words of James Tobin – a little grit in the wheels of financial capitalism.

Refusal steals value from ‘the system of destruction’.  It mutualises brand value.  And this approach to stealing back value, this unconsumption, is well worth paying for…

If we can start to reward creation, not destruction we can find ways to pay for people not plunder.

By accurately and effectively valuing the life story of products, including their shared production and their common ownership, environmental capitalism can evolve into social capitalism.  The pieces of the product we end up paying tomorrow will be the pieces we steal today.

The time we invest in care and repair, in creativity and choice-editing, in individualising and socialising our choices – this is the value we can steal back from the system.  By adhering to the five Rs we create social value.  These will be the unconsumptive values that brand owners will seek offer us back in the decades ahead. And they cost nothing. So steal with pride.

Become a Refusenik.

The colours of this web-site – the dark blue and brownish-grey – have enormous significance for him. The blue  - a sort of muddied ultramarine or ultraviolet colour – echoes a stage-set he created years ago and evokes the colour just before dawn – a time when the despair of night ends and the hope of day begins. In his mind, this transitional colour has a luminescence – it conjures memories of gold, painted to burn behind the blue. Likewise, the grey colour brings him memories of an experience walking on a dorset beach across slabby, ankle-breaking rocks.  It evokes solidity, calm and a sort of impermeable truthfulness, and a very particular rock.

When I look at the web-site, I feel a mix of emotions.  I do, precisely, feel a combination of tension and calm he is seeking to evoke, but I also see a certain murkiness – an indeterminacy. A kind of open-closed tension, in that I am not sure whether or not I am invited in. In short, we disagree, or more accurately, meaning has been transformed.

The point of this little diversion on colour is that I am encountering exactly the same issue on a writing course I’m undertaking.  We were recently asked to answer the question “What is a story?”.  Having resisted the temptation to respond with “What is a question?” I eventually managed to produce a sensible, constrained response.

But in doing so, I became viscerally aware, in a way I never have before, of the paradoxical nature of language.  Hemingway is credited with writing the shortest short story, which goes simply, in its entirety:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.

We can debate whether this is a story – when all of the action take place in the imagination, and I would, and did.  But the very act of considering this question brings us into contact with the most fundamental truth of language.

Language is both personal and social.  It is both symbolic and systemic.  Language is a public private partnership.

This is the paradox at the heart of creativity – to sketch a space in which meaning can be exchanged, but never unified.

Language holds reality. But only very loosely. The act of creation and the act of consumption borrow a loosely-shared lexicon which is wholly insufficient for the task of communicating experience, let alone higher truths.  But this is its joy.

It’s true, as Herman Hesse says, that “words do not express thoughts very well”.  But I would argue that they don’t have to.  Meaning lives in the gaps.  Meaning lives in our personal punctuation. We must give it space.

To disagree with the words of Somerset Maugham.

“Only disconnect”

And see what comes.

At a personal level, as someone with a fervid desire to change the world at every available opportunity, this resonates as an almost spiritual truism!

At a professional level, as I try to help The Chartered Institute for IT to catalyse a ‘metacluster’ of technology innovation capability across the UK, our success depends upon it.

Roland is right. We need new, more humanistic collaborative approaches which bridge the location-irrelevance of skills and the location-dependence of culture, heritage and social energy. When people meet, noticing can happen. Noticing is a precursor to lasting change.

The future is already here, after all, but it’s just not evenly distributed.

My very strong view on the future, is that form of delivering stakeholder assurance – management consultants, ERP systems, standards bodies, and standards themselves will be replaced by a variety of new forms of DIY accountability. I’ll be focusing my future consulting efforts on helping organisations and industry to self-organise. To be more self-reliant. To replace narrow sustainability with a new collectivism of self-sufficiency and mutual self-help.

In the UK, Cameron’s Big Society is an exercise in shifting the public sector burden to the private and voluntary sectors. What this vision does not yet embrace, and must, is the renovation of the private sector itself as a mutualist undertaking. This is my ’special project’.

As a first example, take a look at We are what we do. This is the future. It’s just #notevenlydistributed.

If your goal is to build a customer community, why bother with the interim step of a web-site to get between you and your customers?

This certainly seems to be the thinking of KAHRO diamonds, just launched at KAHRO Facebook. Luxury psychologist Dr Isaac Mostovicz is offering to help you choose the perfect diamond, based on his academic research into personality types.

Will the idea take off? Who knows! But it’s certainly a new disruptive take on business launches, and a great example of an emerging uncompany.

The next logical step will be to train customers to ’self-diagnose’ and become a diamond-lovers’ self-help community…

The latest episode on BBC Radio, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2010/03/100305_the_virtual_revolution_part_three.shtml she highlights the social externalities of Google-style advertising.

In this, the 3rd episode, she rues the loss of serendipity. And with serendipity removed, we face a process that “appears to broaden our horizons but sells us the same old thing.”

Doug Rushkoff explores the long-term social implication of recommendation engines (and implicitly social media) thus: “The more like one of my kind of people I become, the less myself I am.”

There is no such thing as free.

Agriculture’s share of development spend has collapsed from around 17% to just THREE per cent…in barely twenty years…

Now don’t get me wrong – urbanisation is a great idea.  Instrumental in China; partially successful in Brasil; and collossally underexploited in India.  But it isn’t the answer to sustainable prosperity and quality of life on a crowded planet.  

We have to rewind a little.  We have to maintain a pervasive and universal commitment to agriculture.  We need, I think, a commitment to reruralisation – to knowledge-based agriculture!  

Renewable energy may eventually fuel our cars (via fuel cells) but it will never feed the planet.  But we have, as yet, no good alternative to our present unsustainable food sources.  Our food supply is dangerously fragile.

IMHO, we must move beyond an expedient and exploitative ’sustainability’ to genuine symbiosis.  I’ve been a committed advocate of organic in the past.  And I still see the ‘harmonious’ value of organic approaches. 

Social, or systemic sustainability is perhaps more pressing now that environmental balancing…

We must fix both.  But we need a much more solid evidence-base on which to make our decisions.

Above all, we need to produce a better system of accountability for sustainable development…